I’m a Stay at Home Mom. I’m not THESE things:

A Trophy wife

I know it’s hard to tell looking at me, though. (She says as she’s sitting in yoga pants with unwashed hair, no makeup and smelling faintly of baby poo.) But I don’t stay at home because I’m “too pretty to work.” Once upon a time I had a career that I really enjoyed. I was freakin’ good at it, too. I made important decisions and people respected me. Now I get shit on. Literally. Daily, even. So it’s hard to remember my life of respect and worldly contribution sometimes. But I’m not just a pretty face that gets knocked up on accident. (hahaha, God, that anyone would think that makes me laugh.)

Bon Bon Lazy

I hate this one. I think all stay at home moms do. Because unless my kids are wearing dirty clothes, eating McDonald’s and rolling around in their own feces, I’ve been doing house crap all damned day. If you see me online shopping… well how do you think my family gets stuff? Someone has to do the fun stuff, too. So I do. That’s pretty much how the house works when you’re a stay at home mom. “Someone has to do that” … “I guess that’s mom.” It is kinda my job. So I do it all.

And I don’t even like Bonbons. I think. I don’t really know what bonbons are.

A Maternal Goddess

I think I only get this at first when people meet me. Like, they come in and see I’ve Pinterested some shit that day and think I’ve actually got this mother thing figured out. And then I open my mouth or my kids do or something. It’s pretty obvious at that point that this is not me. From time to time, I throw my hat in the “World’s best Mommy” fight. I make homemade granola bars and I sew them little car seat ponchos and I make their lunches in animal shapes. And then? I get bitch slapped by some ungrateful kid who doesn’t care about any of that and I’m done with all that “extra” for a little while. Catch me on the extra day and you may be deceived. But catch me on the “done with all that extra” day and you’ll probably think I’m Bon Bon Lazy.

Rich as shit

I get where this stereotype comes from, I really do. I hear a lot of “I couldn’t afford to stay home with my kids” from my mom’s generation. Well, it used to be cheaper to pay for their kid’s childcare when they went back to work. So they still had money left over after the sitter was paid. Now, child care is more expensive than college. And, I don’t know about you, but I had to take out loans to pay for college. I don’t want to take out loans for childcare.

Plus, dude, I don’t care how rich I am, I’m not going to go to work and miss out on my kids’ childhoods for like $4 an hour.

Uneducated and unable to get a good enough job to pay for childcare

If a person knows the above, then this is the new stereotype I get. So yeah, it’s expensive and I have three kids. I could get a good enough job to pay for the childcare and still have some left over. (Not much, though. Because … again… to reiterate… childcare is expensive as shit.)

Let’s just do some basic math for this whole thing. They say to budget 10% of your income for childcare. But that’s bullshit. It’s more like 30-40% for most families. So… considering the woman makes roughly 20% less than the male… childcare is most of an average woman’s income. Americans pays about $18,000 in childcare per kid. So for 2 kids… if you’re going to pay only 10%, you’d have to make $175,000 a year. The average college graduate makes $50k after school. So, you and your spouse each have earn $37,000 more annually before you have kids. ‘Cause that’s real freakin’ likely.

A Cult leader

“Are you going to home school?” “Don’t you think it’s important to protect your kids from the world today?” “You know they’re just brainwashing the public with _________. Keep them out and raise them the way you want!” (By the way, you can fill in the blank with your choice ultra liberal dirty hippie anti vax shit or ultra conservative bigot-y gun toting shit.)

Whatever your reasoning for thinking I’m raising them to be exactly who I want them to be, without a brain of their own… nope. Just to spite, I’m gonna like, YouTube wiccans and NRA for the kids to watch. These kids will know all about the world so they get to live however the hell they want. I’m teaching them how to think, not what to think.

The Real Reason

Sometimes the real reason just isn’t what you think it is. I chose to stay home with my kids because when I had my first two we were in Little Rock, AR. And at the time, the local childcare places didn’t require background checks on their employees who had been citizens of AR for longer than 5 years. So… Noooooope. We could have put them on base and made sure there weren’t a bunch of felons and pedophiles watching the kids, but I’d heard the base was only compliant in their certification the like, week prior to an inspection. So again, nope.

And ya know what’s the most important part of this? It’s my family. Not yours. This is what we decided to do for our family. None of your business to pass judgement on. The end.